time to glue my head back on...

[thanate]

So the way this swap thing is set up (I did talk about the swap thing, right? you get paired up with a theme, and make stuff to send someone else?) you're supposed to make some quantity of items that are size-graded by effort and money input. So large is anything over 4 hours or so, small is under 2 hours, medium is in between. Great, right. And most swaps want you to do one of each. And you can trade up or down (2 small = 1 medium, 2 medium = 1 large, etc) as suits your crafting preferences.

This is all very well, but I find that I don't *do* things that I spend small amounts of time on. I do bead embroidery (extra large), I make things up as I go along, spending large amounts of time staring at things until they sort themselves out into how they're supposed to go together, and I get horribly carried away.

For instance: I'm doing a faerie/folklore swap, and my partner likes (among other things) Cinderella, mythical creatures, and greek mythology. So I'm making her a reversible Cinderella-esque bag (large, of course), which needed a glass slipper as a zipper pull. So I got shrinky dinks, to make a slipper out of. (Ok, and because I wanted to play with shrink plastic) And then I started looking up clip art, and making monster charms. Ooh, mythical creatures! This'll be quick and easy! Cool, right? So far so good. But you can't just make a dragon and a unicorn and a centaur and stop there. So I've got up to about 12 mythical creatures (don't know how many I'm sending... and I had some brilliant idea for something else that ought to be included, and then promptly forgot it again) and they all had to be traced and colored, and cut out, and hole punched, and now I get to bake them and hope they don't die horribly...

And of course then I need something to put them in. Another chance to make a small craft, right? Maybe I'll do better this time! And then there was this conversation at work in which I realized that it should, of course, be Pandora's box they all come out of. And I went to the craft store to get one of those little wood boxes to decorate, maybe paint and stick some fake jewels on, something quick. And then I found one that I looked at and said "Perfect! It looks just like a little Etruscan tomb!" So now I have to look up pictures of etruscan tombs, and try to design a proper Pandora-esque frieze to go on the front... And of course it's entirely possible that the person I'm making this for doesn't know what an etruscan tomb looks like, and won't particularly care, but having thought of it, I've got to do it "right."

Comments

[astormorray.livejournal.com]

seriously, the swap guidelines are all crazy, especially if you knit? :P The one swap I did, the knitters <-> crocheters swap... all the crocheters sent on time, but the knitters are still drizzling in, a week and a half past send-outs. I would argue there's no such thing as a medium knitting project, based on time commitments. But yeah, nothing I sent my partner was under 4 hours of work! I think I ended up with two larges and a medium when all was said and done. And I was seriously knitting and clothing that girl forever... I find the monetary outlying guidelines a better fit, the way I work.

Also, I was weeding out my mail, and I re-read people's notes about themselves that we get at the beginning of swaps, and realized that I pretty much disregard them... Well, I read them, and pick up something? And then I go with my impressions, rather than reality. :P

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I don't know. We had one girl in the favorite color swap who did a whole bunch of little knit things (chunky yarn hat, large gauge scarf, little felted bowl) but yeah, if you're going to do something more than basic I certainly couldn't do it in any kind of one-evening timescale. Although given some of the chatter on the threads I've been on, we are definitely not the only ones.